My last conversation with Sarah was an intimate chat last year in the midst of revelry. We sat at the end of a long Christmas Eve table crowded with food and family, good cheer and laughter. It was as though she and I were alone in a raindrop.

Sarah was dying, had been for more than a year, and knew it. We didn’t mention cancer because we didn’t have to. It sat with us. Her mood was not one of resignation but the softer side of the coin, acceptance. Her demeanor reminded me of something she’d said years ago, a philosophy forged at a young age: “You get what you get.”

Her mother, Donna Alvarez Mislak, and I are first cousins, more like brother and sister. Our fathers – Manuel Alvarez and Victor Alvarez – were brothers in old Highlandtown. It was in the fabled neighborhood of immigrant

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